Video: Chefs perfecting recipes to take on the road

Sunday

Mar 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMMar 30, 2008 at 10:42 AM

Brad Yearwood has been firing up the burners to come up with the perfect rabbit recipe. His concoction uses the loin, legs and eventually the full carcass of the critter to create a dish that he hopes top chefs from across the country will appreciate. He'll use his rabbit dish this weekend at the Northeast Regional Chef of the Year competition.

Stephanie Bergeron

The Easter Bunny visited the Yearwood house a different way this year — on a platter.

Brad Yearwood, executive chef at Cobblestone Creek Country Club in Victor, N.Y., has been firing up the burners to come up with the perfect rabbit recipe. His concoction uses the loin, legs and eventually the full carcass of the critter to create a dish that he hopes top chefs from across the country will appreciate.

“I’m going to take this bunny to Cincinnati and win,” he said.

This weekend, April 5-7, Yearwood will participate in the most important contest of his career — the American Culinary Federation’s Northeast Regional Chef of the Year competition.

Held in Cincinnati, the competition is judged by some of the nation’s most famous chefs. Yearwood, who holds the title of the American Culinary Foundation of Rochester’s Chef of the Year, was chosen from a pool of hundreds of chefs to compete. If he wins the regional competition, he advances to the national challenge in Las Vegas.

“It’s very prestigious to be with the company of some of the other chefs I’m competing against,” he said. “It’s the bragging rights — just being able to say that you’re the USA Chef of the Year.”

The rules of the competition are simple: Choose a protein and make four of the same dishes in one hour. Nothing can be prepared ahead of time, and chefs bring their own materials.

Yearwood’s competition is fierce. He’s up against a culinary Olympian, an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America and a chef from the Washington, D.C., Convention Center — all master chefs at the top of their careers.

Yearwood said he has tried out his rabbit dish about 15 times, getting advice from other chefs and trying something different each time. He said he wants to be able to prepare the meal with his eyes closed and not miss a beat in the process.

He has competed with the same recipe in smaller culinary competitions in Boston and Cleveland.

“I’ve taken my rabbit on the road,” he said.

At home, he sets up a timer and competes against himself, testing how long it takes to make sausage stuffing, risotto and fiddleheads and asparagus. Yearwood said his recipe showcases many of his skills as a chef, like braising, poaching and working with meats. He’s turning his colleagues on to the delicacy of rabbit, too.

“Nobody liked rabbit when they first started,” he said. “All the sudden, my cooks, they really like rabbit now.”

Yearwood said practice and trial and error have helped him a lot during his career as a chef.

He graduated in 1992 from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park in the Hudson Valley. He got his start as a professional chef in Colorado and later moved back to New York and worked as a chef at the Lincoln Hill Inn in Canandaigua and then at the Genesee Valley Club in Rochester. Even now, as executive chef at Cobblestone, Yearwood said he’s still learning, and that’s one of the reasons why he enters cooking competitions.

“No matter what I do, I still don’t know enough,” he said. “I get to learn different skills and see what other chefs are doing.”

Former colleague James Neuman, executive pastry chef at the Genesee Valley Club, is also competing in Cincinnati for the title of pastry chef of the year with an almond sponge cake filled with vanilla-bean pineapple compote.

Neuman noted Yearwood’s competitors are master chefs, the highest rank in the culinary profession, but “he’s definitely got the competitive nature, he knows what he’s doing.”

Yearwood said his strength in the competition is that he’s well prepared.
His weakness?

“Nerves,” he said. “I’ll probably be competing in front of 100 different chefs.”

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